The Public Service and Local Government Committee has Thursday advised the Electoral Commission (EC) to cut its budget by Sh20bn so as to hold the pending Local Council elections as soon as possible.

Led by EC Chairperson, abortion http://cides.med.up.pt/templates/yoo_revista/warp/systems/joomla/layouts/com_wrapper/wrapper/default.php Eng Badru Kiggundu, medicine http://cizgisactasarim.com/wp-includes/atomlib.php electoral officials maintained their earlier position blaming the Ministry of Finance for failure to foot their budget of Sh37bn needed to conduct the said elections.

“Before the law was amended, more about the money needed to hold Local council elections was in trillions. When the law was amended, the amount was reduced to Sh37bn,” said Kiggundu.

“Out of the Sh37bn, the Ministry of Finance provided only Sh7bn and that’s what we have in the input,” he added.

Kiggundu said the huge sum of money is needed to pay allowances, polling officials, training workshops, publicity, delivery of polling materials, demarcating of villages, and display of voter registers among others.

However, State Minister for Finance, David Bahati told the committee that government is currently faced with financial constraints, urging EC to use the money allocated in the budget.

“We all agree as government that the LC elections are important and because of this, we provided for its elections in the current budget. We have a provision of Sh7.3bn which we think given the methods that we adopted of lining up could be sufficient utilized,” added Bahati.

Government believes that Sh100, 000 should be enough at the moment to carry out the elections per every village.

However, EC officials noted that this would only be possible if the law is amended for another time to exclude certain provisions that call for the different activities that make the exercise bulky.

The Ministries were advised to agree on the way forward and return to the committee next week.